Professional Solar Blind Corona Camera

COROCAM 6N

...robust, LIGHT WEIGHT, non-solar blind & easy to operate

COROCAM 6D

...robust, LIGHT WEIGHT, solar blind & easy to operate

The Original Corona Camera Manufacturer

UViRCO Technologies is a South African company which manufactures & markets the CoroCAM brand of corona cameras.

Using the UViRCO CoroCAM to perform condition monitoring of high voltage electrical power infrastructure hardware, in terms of external partial discharges, gives power utilities the ability to non-destructively determine where preventative maintenance should be performed to avoid outages and equipment failure. External partial discharges (i.e. Corona, Sparking and Arcing) is indicative of contaminated or degraded hardware, faulty installation or design errors.

CoroCAM cameras are used by:

Power Utilities

Inspection Service Providers

Railways (Electric)

Heavy Industry

Mines

High voltage laboratories

To perform:

Generator / motor coil insulation inspection

Transmission line hardware inspection

Distribution line hardware inspection

Substation hardware inspection

Experimentation

During a partial discharge the air around HV equipment is caused to fluoresce. The air is mainly composed of Nitrogen, which emits UV light (UVa, UVb & UVc) during fluorescence. Fluorescence does not generate any heat therefore the phenomenon is invisible to thermal cameras.

All modern CoroCAM’s feature at least 2 internal cameras: one UV camera and one visible camera. The UV image is overlaid onto the visible image to locate the source of the discharge or the UV image is viewed alone to see the shape of the discharge.

CoroCAM models can be non solar blind (NSB) or solar blind (SB).

Non-Solar Blind cameras feature a UV camera which is sensitive to UVa & UVb light. UVa & UVb is abundant in sunlight, therefore these CoroCAM’s can only be used indoors or at night, else it may be blinded by the ambient sunlight.

Solar blind cameras feature a special filter which blocks all light frequencies from the sun observed at ground level, rendering it blind to solar (sun) light. UVc light (100-280nm) is not blocked. Some UVc light is emitted by the fluorescence of air caused by discharges, this allows for inspections to be performed in full daylight.

Some solar blind models also have thermal imaging modules allowing for multi-spectral imaging, correlating the thermal image with the UV image of the corona allows operators to determine the type of discharge activity.